There is increasing and widespread use of contact centres, also known as call centres, by businesses and organisations for providing services to existing and potential customers. A contact centre is, typically, a large, centralised facility in the form of a call switching centre, wherein each agent has a workstation that includes a computer and a telephone device connected to a telecom switch. Increasingly, voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through computer telephony integration (CTI), which encompasses automatic call routing, etc. Many contact centres are configured to provide an incoming caller with access to many different services and resources, including those hosted by third parties, and the work flow employed for a respective caller will be dependent on the specific service/resource they require, often ascertained by an agent during an initial portion of an incoming call.
For example, after speaking to an agent for a period of time, an incoming caller may be required to complete a financial transaction, which requires the caller to provide items of personal data such as credit and debit card numbers, bank account information, date of birth, alphanumeric passwords, and the like. Such sensitive information, if compromised, can be used in criminal activity such as identity fraud and theft and, as such, security within, at least some, contact centre work flows is a key consideration. In general, businesses that engage in financial transactions are required to be compliant with PCI Security Council standards, which require all security risks within the scope of the business to be assessed and mitigated. Thus, the more security risk deemed to be within the scope of the business, the greater will be the onus on the business (and associated cost) of mitigating that risk.
In order to limit the security risk to the business, a third party hosted software application may be employed for the purposes of supporting operations such as financial transactions, and the agent may be provided with the facility to transfer a call to such an application as required within the contact centre workflow. However, in most cases, the agent will be required to guide the caller through the financial transaction, or at least be able to view its progress and outcome, as well as return to the call when the transaction has been completed, and as such the agent needs to actively remain on the call whilst the financial transaction is taking place. Indeed, there are several circumstances in which a contact centre may be required to provide the facility to connect some callers to a third party/hosted application, whether on- or off-site and, in many cases, the agent may be required to remain connected to the call and/or return to the call when the caller has completed their interaction with the hosted application.
As a result, known contact centre systems employ one-to-one mapping of agent workstations to a third party software application. In other words, if there are 100 agents, then the software application must have 100 respective dedicated ports to enable incoming calls to be mapped, as required, to the application. Thus, the application functionality is effectively provided to 100% of callers for 100% of each call, which results in a large element of redundancy within the system, especially for applications that may not be used by every caller and may only represent a very small proportion of the total time of an incoming call. This also has a significant cost implication when it is required to increase the capacity of the contact centre.